Old Saxon

This article is about the ancient language of the continental Saxons. For the Anglo-Saxon language, see Old English. For the ancient Saxon people who spoke the language, see Saxons. For all other uses, see Saxon (disambiguation).

Historically, Old Saxon and Old Dutch were considered to be distinct dialects of an otherwise one unitary language rather than two languages, primarily because they were linked through a dialect continuum spanning modern Netherlands and Germany. However, while these two languages both shared the same historical origins and some very similar writing styles, Old Saxon shows a slightly reduced morphology compared to Old Dutch, which kept some grammatical distinctions that Old Saxon abandoned. There are also various differences in their phonological evolutions, Old Saxon being classified as an Ingvaeonic language whereas Old Dutch is one of the Istvaeonic languages.

In the Middle Ages, a dialect continuum existed between Old Dutch and Old Saxon; this was only recently interrupted by the simultaneous dissemination of standard languages within each nation and the dissolution of folk dialects. Despite sharing some features, a number of disparities separate Old Saxon, Old English, and Old Dutch; one such difference is the Old Dutch utilization of -a as its plural a-stem noun ending, while Old Saxon and Old English employ -as or -os. However, it seems that some Middle Dutch took the Old Saxon a-stem ending from some Middle Low German dialects, as modern Dutch still shows the plural ending -s added to certain words.

Old Saxon (or Old Low German) probably evolved primarily from Ingvaeonic dialects in the West Germanic branch of Proto-Germanic in the 5th century. However, Old Saxon, even if it is considered as an Ingvaeonic language, is not a pure Ingvaeonic dialect as Old Frisian and Old English are, the two latter sharing some other Ingvaeonic characteristics, like the great vowel shift that took place in both Old English and Old Frisian. This, plus the large number of different forms that the language took, often showing different West-Germanic features, led some philologists to mistakenly think that Old Dutch and Old Saxon were variations of the same language, and that Old Saxon was indeed an Istvaeonic language.[3]

Old Saxon naturally evolved into Middle Low German over the course of the 11th and 12th century, with a great shift from Latin to Low German writing happening around 1150, so that the development of the language can be traced from that period.

The most striking difference between Middle Low German and Old Saxon is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction, which took place in the other West Germanic languages and some Scandinavian dialects such as Danish, reducing all unstressed vowels to schwa. Thus, such Old Saxon words like gisprekan (spoken) or dagō (days' – gen. pl.) became gesprēken and dāge.

Old Saxon did not participate in the High German consonant shift, and thus preserves stop consonants p, t, k that have been shifted in Old High German to various fricatives and affricates. The Germanic diphthongs ai, au consistently develop into long vowels ē, ō, whereas in Old High German they appear either as ei, ou or ē, ō depending on the following consonant.

Old Saxon, alone of the West Germanic languages except for Frisian, consistently preserves Germanic -j- after a consonant, e.g. hēliand "savior" (Old High German: heilant, Old English: hǣlend, Gothic: háiljands). Germanic umlaut, when it occurs with short a, is inconsistent, e.g. hebbean or habbian "to have" (Old English: habban). This feature was carried over into the descendant-language of Old Saxon, Middle Low German, where e.g. the adjective krank (sick, ill) had the comparative forms krenker and kranker. Apart from the e, however, the umlaut is not marked in writing.

The voiceless spirants /f/, /θ/, and /s/ gain voiced allophones ([v], [ð], and [z]) when between vowels. This change is only faithfully reflected in writing for [v] (represented with letters such as ⟨ƀ⟩ and ⟨u⟩). The other two allophones continued to be written as before.

Fricatives were devoiced again word-finally. Beginning in the later Old Saxon period, stops became devoiced word-finally as well.

Most consonants could be geminated. Notably, geminated /v/ gave /bb/, and geminated /ɣ/ probably gave /ɡɡ/. Geminated /h/ resulted in /xx/.

Germanic *h is retained as [x] in these positions and thus merges with devoiced /ɣ/.

The closing diphthongs /ei/ and /ou/ sometimes occur in texts (especially in Genesis), probably under the influence of Franconian or High German dialects, where they replace Old Saxon developments /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ (which evolved from Proto-Germanic/ai/ and /au/).

The situation for the front opening diphthongs is somewhat unclear in some texts. Words written with io in the Heliand, the most extensive record of Old Saxon writing, are often found written variably with ia or even ie in most other texts, notably the later ones. The diphthong eventually merges into /eː/ in almost every Middle Low German dialect.

There also existed 'long' diphthongs /oːu/, /aːu/ and /eːu/. These were, however, treated as two-syllable sequences of a long vowel followed by a short one, not proper diphthongs.

Old Saxon nouns were inflected in very different ways following their classes. Here are the endings for dag, "day" an a-stem masculine noun:

dag 'day' m.

Case

Singular

Plural

Nominative

dag

dagos

Accusative

dag

dagos

Genitive

dages, -as

dago

Dative

dage, -a

dagum, -un

At the end of the Old Saxon period, distinctions between noun classes began to disappear, and endings from one were often transferred to the other declension, and vice versa. This happened to be a large process, and the most common noun classes started to cause the least represented to disappear. As a result, in Middle Low German, only the former weak n-stem and strong a-stem classes remained. These two noun inflection classes started being added to words not only following the historical belonging of this word, but also following the root of the word.

The Old Saxon verb inflection system reflects an intermediate stage between Old English and Old Dutch, and further Old High German. Unlike Old High German and Old Dutch, but similarly to Old English, it did not preserve the three different verb endings in the plural, all featured as -ad (also -iad or -iod following the different verb inflection classes). Like Old Dutch, it had only two classes of weak verb, with only a few relic verbs of the third weak class (namely four verbs: libbian, seggian, huggian and hebbian).

This table sums up all the seven Old Saxon strong verb classes and the three weak verb classes:

It should be noticed that the third weak verb class includes only four verbs (namely libbian, seggian, huggian and hebbian); it is a remnant of an older and larger class that was kept in Old High German.

Similarly, wh- forms were not used as relative pronouns (as in "the man who saw me" or "the car which I bought"). Instead, an indeclinable word the was used, often in conjunction with the definite article (which was declined for case, number and gender).

Old Saxon comes down in a number of different manuscripts whose spelling systems sometimes differ markedly. In this section, only the letters used in normalized versions of the Heliand will be kept, and the sounds modern scholars have traditionally assigned to these letters. Where spelling deviations in other texts may point to significant pronunciation variants, this will be indicated.

In general, the spelling of Old Saxon corresponds quite well to that of the other ancient Germanic languages, such as Old High German or Gothic.

c and k were both used for [k]. However, it seems that, as in other West-Germanic dialects, when [k] was followed by i or e, it had the pronunciation /ts/ or /kʲsʲ/.[4] The letters c and x were preferred for the palatalisations, k and even sometimes ch being rather used before u, o or a for /k/ (kuning for [kʏnɪŋk] 'king', modern köning ; crûci for [kryːtsi] ; forsachistu for [forsakistuː]).

g seems, at least in a few dialects, to have had the pronunciation [j] or [ʝ] at the beginning of a word, only when followed by i or e. Thus we find giār[jaːr] 'year' and even gēr[jeːr] 'year', the latter betraying a strong Old Frisian influence.

Only a few texts survive, predominantly baptismal vows the Saxons were required to perform at the behest of Charlemagne. The only literary texts preserved are Heliand and fragments of the Old Saxon Genesis.

1.
Old English
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Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid 5th century, Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain, Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule, Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms. The oldest Old English inscriptions were using a runic system. Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is a process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections. Perhaps around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic dialects from the 5th century. It came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England and this included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, Norse was also widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century, the oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmons Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century, with the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, a later literary standard, dating from the later 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. This form of the language is known as the Winchester standard and it is considered to represent the classical form of Old English

2.
Saxons
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The Saxons were a group of Germanic tribes first mentioned as living near the North Sea coast of what is now Germany, in the late Roman empire. They were soon mentioned as raiding and settling in many North Sea areas, as well as pushing south inland towards the Franks. Significant numbers settled in parts of Great Britain in the early Middle Ages. Many Saxons however remained in Germania, where they resisted the expanding Frankish Empire through the leadership of the semi-legendary Saxon hero, the Saxons earliest area of settlement is believed to have been Northern Albingia, an area approximately that of modern Holstein. This general area also included the probable homeland of the Angles, Saxons, along with the Angles and other continental Germanic tribes, participated in the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain during and after the 5th century. The British-Celtic inhabitants of the isles tended to refer to all of these collectively as Saxons. It is unknown how many Saxons migrated from the Continent to Britain, the Saxons may have derived their name from seax, a kind of knife for which they were known. The seax has a symbolic impact in the English counties of Essex and Middlesex. Their names, along with those of Sussex and Wessex, contain a remnant of the word Saxon. The Elizabethan era play Edmund Ironside suggests the Saxon name derives from the Latin saxa, Their names discover what their natures are, More hard than stones, in the Celtic languages, the words designating English nationality derive from the Latin word Saxones. The most prominent example, a loanword in English, is the Scottish Gaelic Sassenach and it derives from the Scottish Gaelic Sasunnach meaning, originally, Saxon, from the Latin Saxones. Scots- or Scottish English-speakers in the 21st century usually use it as a term for an English person. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1771 as the date of the earliest written use of the word in English. Sasanach, the Irish word for an Englishman, has the same derivation, as do the words used in Welsh to describe the English people, Cornish terms the English Sawsnek, from the same derivation. In the 16th century Cornish-speakers used the phrase Meea navidna cowza sawzneck to feign ignorance of the English language, England in Scottish Gaelic is Sasainn. Other examples include the Welsh Saesneg, Irish Sasana, Breton saoz, and Cornish Sowson, Sowsnek, the label Saxons was also applied to German settlers who migrated during the 13th century to southeastern Transylvania. From Transylvania, some Saxons migrated to neighbouring Moldavia, as the name of the town, Sas-cut, sascut is located in the part of Moldavia that is today part of Romania. The Finns and Estonians have changed their usage of the term Saxony over the centuries to denote now the country of Germany

3.
Germany
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Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe. It includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,021 square kilometres, with about 82 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous member state of the European Union. After the United States, it is the second most popular destination in the world. Germanys capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while its largest conurbation is the Ruhr, other major cities include Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Leipzig. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity, a region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period the Germanic tribes expanded southward, beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation, in 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic, the establishment of the national socialist dictatorship in 1933 led to World War II and the Holocaust. After a period of Allied occupation, two German states were founded, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, in 1990, the country was reunified. In the 21st century, Germany is a power and has the worlds fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP. As a global leader in industrial and technological sectors, it is both the worlds third-largest exporter and importer of goods. Germany is a country with a very high standard of living sustained by a skilled. It upholds a social security and universal health system, environmental protection. Germany was a member of the European Economic Community in 1957. It is part of the Schengen Area, and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999, Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G8, the G20, and the OECD. The national military expenditure is the 9th highest in the world, the English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz popular, derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- people, the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a mine in Schöningen where three 380, 000-year-old wooden javelins were unearthed

4.
Netherlands
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The Netherlands, also informally known as Holland is the main constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a densely populated country located in Western Europe with three territories in the Caribbean. The European part of the Netherlands borders Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, sharing borders with Belgium, the United Kingdom. The three largest cities in the Netherlands are Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, Amsterdam is the countrys capital, while The Hague holds the Dutch seat of parliament and government. The port of Rotterdam is the worlds largest port outside East-Asia, the name Holland is used informally to refer to the whole of the country of the Netherlands. Netherlands literally means lower countries, influenced by its low land and flat geography, most of the areas below sea level are artificial. Since the late 16th century, large areas have been reclaimed from the sea and lakes, with a population density of 412 people per km2 –507 if water is excluded – the Netherlands is classified as a very densely populated country. Only Bangladesh, South Korea, and Taiwan have both a population and higher population density. Nevertheless, the Netherlands is the worlds second-largest exporter of food and agricultural products and this is partly due to the fertility of the soil and the mild climate. In 2001, it became the worlds first country to legalise same-sex marriage, the Netherlands is a founding member of the EU, Eurozone, G-10, NATO, OECD and WTO, as well as being a part of the Schengen Area and the trilateral Benelux Union. The first four are situated in The Hague, as is the EUs criminal intelligence agency Europol and this has led to the city being dubbed the worlds legal capital. The country also ranks second highest in the worlds 2016 Press Freedom Index, the Netherlands has a market-based mixed economy, ranking 17th of 177 countries according to the Index of Economic Freedom. It had the thirteenth-highest per capita income in the world in 2013 according to the International Monetary Fund, in 2013, the United Nations World Happiness Report ranked the Netherlands as the seventh-happiest country in the world, reflecting its high quality of life. The Netherlands also ranks joint second highest in the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, the region called Low Countries and the country of the Netherlands have the same toponymy. Place names with Neder, Nieder, Nether and Nedre and Bas or Inferior are in use in all over Europe. They are sometimes used in a relation to a higher ground that consecutively is indicated as Upper, Boven, Oben. In the case of the Low Countries / the Netherlands the geographical location of the region has been more or less downstream. The geographical location of the region, however, changed over time tremendously

5.
Denmark
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The term Danish Realm refers to the relationship between Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands and Greenland—three countries constituting the Kingdom of Denmark. The legal nature of the Kingdom of Denmark is fundamentally one of a sovereign state. The Faroe Islands and Greenland have been part of the Crown of Denmark since 1397 when the Kalmar Union was ratified, legal matters in The Danish Realm are subject to the Danish Constitution. Beginning in 1953, state law issues within The Danish Realm has been governed by The Unity of the Realm, a less formal name for The Unity of the Realm is the Commonwealth of the Realm. In 1978, The Unity of The Realm was for the first time referred to as rigsfællesskabet. The name caught on and since the 1990s, both The Unity of The Realm and The Danish Realm itself has increasingly been referred to as simply rigsfællesskabet in daily parlance. The Danish Constitution stipulates that the foreign and security interests for all parts of the Danish Realm are the responsibility of the Danish government, the Faroes received home rule in 1948 and Greenland did so in 1979. In 2005, the Faroes received a self-government arrangement, and in 2009 Greenland received self rule, the Danish Realms unique state of internal affairs is acted out in the principle of The Unity of the Realm. This principle is derived from Article 1 of the Danish Constitution which specifies that constitutional law applies equally to all areas of the Danish Realm, the Constitutional Act specifies that sovereignty is to continue to be exclusively with the authorities of the Realm. The language of Denmark is Danish, and the Danish state authorities are based in Denmark, the Kingdom of Denmarks parliament, with its 179 members, is located in the capital, Copenhagen. Two of the members are elected in each of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The Government ministries are located in Copenhagen, as is the highest court, in principle, the Danish Realm constitutes a unified sovereign state, with equal status between its constituent parts. Devolution differs from federalism in that the powers of the subnational authority ultimately reside in central government. The Self-Government Arrangements devolves political competence and responsibility from the Danish political authorities to the Faroese, the Faroese and Greenlandic authorities administer the tasks taken over from the state, enact legislation in these specific fields and have the economic responsibility for solving these tasks. The Danish government provides a grant to the Faroese and the Greenlandic authorities to cover the costs of these devolved areas. The 1948 Home Rule Act of the Faroe Islands sets out the terms of Faroese home rule, the Act states. the Faroe Islands shall constitute a self-governing community within the State of Denmark. It establishes the government of the Faroe Islands and the Faroese parliament. The Faroe Islands were previously administered as a Danish county, the Home Rule Act abolished the post of Amtmand and these powers were expanded in a 2005 Act, which named the Faroese home government as an equal partner with the Danish government

6.
Middle Low German
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Middle Low German or Middle Saxon is a language that is the descendant of Old Saxon and the ancestor of modern Low German. It served as the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League. It was spoken from about 1100 to 1600, Middle Low German is a term used with varying degrees of inclusivity. It is distinguished from Middle High German, spoken to the south, Middle Low German provided a large number of loanwords to languages spoken around the Baltic Sea as a result of the activities of Hanseatic traders. It is considered the largest single source of loanwords in Estonian, Latvian, Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, spoken all around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Traces of the importance of Middle Low German can be seen by the many found in the Scandinavian, Finnic

7.
Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others

8.
Indo-European languages
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The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline, the classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD

9.
Germanic languages
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It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands

10.
West Germanic languages
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The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages. The three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch, additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch and English as they were languages of colonial empires. The West Germanic languages share many lexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic—archaisms as well as common neologisms, most scholars doubt that there was a Proto-West-Germanic proto-language common to the West Germanic languages and no others, though a few maintain that Proto-West-Germanic existed. Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian, linguists know almost nothing about Weser-Rhine Germanic, in fact, these two terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archeological findings rather than linguistic features. Only later were these terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions, the rhotacism of /z/ to /r/. The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this, rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic at a time when North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished the two phonemes. However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic, the debate on the existence of a Proto-West-Germanic clade was recently summarized, That North Germanic is. A unitary subgroup is completely obvious, as all of its dialects shared a series of innovations. Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West-Germanic morphological forms or lexemes, the first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West-Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler. If indeed Proto-West-Germanic existed, it must have been between the 3rd and 7th centuries, after that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. It has been argued that, judging by their nearly identical syntax, over the course of this period, the dialects diverged successively. Bordering dialects very probably continued to be mutually intelligible even beyond the boundaries of the consonant shift, in fact, many dialects of Limburgish and Ripuarian are still mutually intelligible today. The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages, by early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible, the southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift. Of modern German varieties, Low German is the one that most resembles modern English, the district of Angeln, from which the name English derives, is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. The area of the Saxons lay south of Anglia, the Anglo-Saxons, two Germanic tribes, were a combination of a number of peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula. Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely defined, most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible. Also note that English is part of the North Sea Germanic branch of the West Germanic languages, some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages

11.
Ingvaeonic languages
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Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast. It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison. The other groupings are Istvaeonic, from the Istvaeones, including Dutch, Afrikaans, and related languages and it did not generally undergo the nasal spirant law, it kept the three plural endings distinct and it did not have the -s plural. However, it underwent near-full monophthongization, lost the reflexive pronoun and had the same four relic verbs in weak class 3, amsterdam, John Benjamins B. V. ISBN 978-90-272-3255-7. Das Westgermanische - von der Herausbildung im 3,244 p. in German with English summary, London/Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-9812110-7-8. Maurer, Friedrich Nordgermanen und Alemannen, Studien zur germanischen und frühdeutschen Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde, ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann. The Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, band I, Einführung – Genealogie – Konstanten. Early Germanic Grammar, Pre-, Proto-, and Post-Germanic

12.
Writing system
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A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field

13.
Latin script
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Latin script is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as in many languages in other parts of the world. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world, Latin script is also the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 most widespread letters are the contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome, in the context of transliteration, the term romanization or romanisation is often found. Unicode uses the term Latin as does the International Organization for Standardization, the numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements, Roman numerals. The numbers 1,2,3. are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, the Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples, most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script. It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines, Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, however, the sound values are completely different. In the late 19th century, the Romanians returned to the Latin alphabet, under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürks reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets, although the only official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers. In 2015, the Kazakh government announced that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the system for the Kazakh language by 2025. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were written with the Roman characters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, a digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩ in English, a trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩

14.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark

15.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as fï¿½r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character

16.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters

17.
Germanic language
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It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands

18.
Low German
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Low German or Low Saxon is a West Germanic language spoken mainly in northern Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands. It is descended from Old Saxon in its earliest form, as an Ingvaeonic language, Low German is quite distinct from the Irminonic languages like Standard German. It is closely related to Anglo-Frisian group of languages and more distantly to Dutch and this difference resulted from the High German consonant shift, with the Uerdingen and Benrath lines being two notable linguistic borders. Dialects of Low German are widely spoken in the area of the Netherlands and are written there with an orthography based on Standard Dutch orthography. Small portions of northern Hesse and northern Thuringia are traditionally Low Saxon-speaking too, historically, Low German was also spoken in formerly German parts of Poland as well as in East Prussia and the Baltic States of Estonia and Latvia. Under the name Low Saxon, there are speakers in the Dutch north-eastern provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, Stellingwerf, Overijssel, German speakers in this area fled the Red Army or were forcibly expelled after the border changes at the end of World War II. Today, there are still speakers outside Germany and the Netherlands to be found in the areas of present-day Poland. In some of these countries, the language is part of the Mennonite religion, there are Mennonite communities in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Minnesota which use Low German in their religious services and communities. The type of Low German spoken in communities and in the Midwest region of the United States has diverged since emigration. The survival of the language is tenuous in many places and has died out in places where assimilation has occurred. Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, Belize, and Chihuahua, Mexico have made Low German a co-official language of the community, in Germany, native speakers of Low German call it Platt, Plattdüütsch or Nedderdüütsch. In the Netherlands, native speakers refer to their language as dialect, plat, nedersaksies, or the name of their village, officially, Low German is called Niederdeutsch by the German authorities and Nedersaksisch by the Dutch authorities. Plattdeutsch/Niederdeutsch and Platduits/Nedersaksisch are seen in texts from the German. In Danish it is called Plattysk, Nedertysk or, rarely, Mennonite Low German is called Plautdietsch. Etymologically Platt meant clear in the sense of a language the people could understand. In Dutch, the word Plat can also mean improper, or rude, the ISO 639-2 language code for Low German has been nds since May 2000. The question of whether Low German should be considered a separate language, linguistics offers no simple, generally accepted criterion to decide this question. Scholarly arguments have been put forward in favour of classifying Low German as a German dialect, as said, these arguments are not linguistic but rather socio-political and build mainly around the fact that Low German has no official standard form or use in sophisticated media

19.
Northern Germany
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Northern Germany is the region in the north of Germany. Its exact area is not precisely or consistently defined but varies depending on one is taking a linguistic, geographic. Northern Germany generally refers to the Sprachraum area north of the Uerdingen and Benrath line isoglosses, however, since World War II and the immigration of expellees from the former eastern territories of Germany, its prevalence has steadily reduced. Besides which, Frisian is spoken in East and North Frisia, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, Northern Germany is linked to the Netherlands, Scandinavia and England. Additionally, Jansen/Janssen, Hansen, and Petersen are the most common surnames in the far north of Germany, which are also some of the most common surnames in Denmark. The key terrain feature of Northern Germany is the North German Plain including the marshes along the coastline of the North and Baltic Seas, as well as the geest and heaths inland. Also prominent are the low hills of the Baltic Uplands, the moraines, end moraines, sandur, glacial valleys, bogs. Likewise the Altmark in Saxony-Anhalt, the Prignitz and Uckermark areas of northern Brandenburg, culturally and socially, Northern Germany is characterized by higher levels of income equality and gender equality, relative to southern and south-western Germany. The traditional Northern German daily diet is centered around boiled potatoes, rye bread, dairy products, cabbages, cucumbers, berries, jams, fish, and pork and beef. A breakfast specialty is the Crispbread or Knäcke, eaten with a variety of such as ham, cheese, fruits. Lentil stews and soups are popular as a working lunch. Regional specialties in Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Lower Saxony include Blutwurst or Blood sausage, another Northern German regional specialty are Hackbraten, meatloaves, made from a mixture of ground pork and beef and served with mashed potatoes, brown sauce and lingonberry jam. Many traditional meat-based lunch dishes are served boiled or mashed potatoes. Eating brunch is popular during weekends in the larger towns. In regions nearer to the coast, fish is popular, with Pickled herring. Coffee drinking is strongly rooted in Northern Germany and the Northern provinces on average consume around 8 kilograms of coffee per capita annually and this is fairly more than the 6 kilograms of coffee per capita consumed in the south. Coffee is frequently drunk four times a day, with breakfast, after lunch, in the evening at around 4, and after dinner. Many working people also drink a coffee at the workstation with the start of the days work, besides, there is a strong tradition of taking coffee breaks and visits to the café with friends and acquaintances

20.
Americas
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The Americas, also collectively called America, encompass the totality of the continents of North America and South America. Together they make up most of the land in Earths western hemisphere, along with their associated islands, they cover 8% of Earths total surface area and 28. 4% of its land area. The topography is dominated by the American Cordillera, a chain of mountains that runs the length of the west coast. The flatter eastern side of the Americas is dominated by river basins, such as the Amazon, St. Lawrence River / Great Lakes basin, Mississippi. Humans first settled the Americas from Asia between 42,000 and 17,000 years ago, a second migration of Na-Dene speakers followed later from Asia. The subsequent migration of the Inuit into the neoarctic around 3500 BCE completed what is regarded as the settlement by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The first known European settlement in the Americas was by the Norse explorer Leif Ericson, however, the colonization never became permanent and was later abandoned. The voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1502 resulted in permanent contact with European powers, diseases introduced from Europe and Africa devastated the indigenous peoples, and the European powers colonized the Americas. Mass emigration from Europe, including numbers of indentured servants. Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution in 1776, the population is over 1 billion, with over 65% of them living in one of the three most populous countries. As of the beginning of the 2010s, the most populous urban agglomerations are Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, all of them megacities. The name America was first recorded in 1507 in the Cosmographiae Introductio, apparently written by Matthias Ringmann and it first applied to both North and South America by Gerardus Mercator in 1538. Amerigen means land of Amerigo and derives from Amerigo and gen, America accorded with the feminine names of Asia, Africa, and Europa. When conceived as a continent, the form is generally the continent of America in the singular. However, without a context, singular America in English commonly refers to the United States of America. In some countries of the world, America is considered a continent encompassing the North America and South America subcontinents, the first inhabitants migrated into the Americas from Asia. Habitation sites are known in Alaska and the Yukon from at least 20,000 years ago, beyond that, the specifics of the Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the dates and routes traveled, are subject to ongoing research and discussion. Widespread habitation of the Americas occurred during the glacial maximum

21.
Eastern Europe
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Eastern Europe, also known as East Europe, is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus on the area it covers, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, cultural. There are almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region, a related United Nations paper adds that every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct. One definition describes Eastern Europe as an entity, the region lying in Europe with main characteristics consisting in Byzantine, Orthodox. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc, a similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Historians and social scientists generally view such definitions as outdated or relegating, several definitions of Eastern Europe exist today, but they often lack precision or are extremely general. These definitions vary both across cultures and among experts, even scientists, recently becoming more and more imprecise. The Ural Mountains, Ural River, and the Caucasus Mountains are the land border of the eastern edge of Europe. Eurovoc, a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union, provides entries for 23 EU languages, of these, those in italics are classified as Eastern Europe in this source. Other official web-pages of the European Union classify some of the countries as strictly Central European. The East–West Schism is the break of communion and theology between what are now the Eastern and Western churches which began in the 11th century and lasts until this very day and it divided Christianity in Europe, and consequently the world, into Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity. Since the Great Schism of 1054, Europe has been divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches in the east, due to this religious cleavage, Eastern Orthodox countries are often associated with Eastern Europe. A cleavage of this sort is, however, often problematic, for example, Greece is overwhelmingly Orthodox, the fall of the Iron Curtain brought the end of the East–West division in Europe, but this geopolitical concept is sometimes still used for quick reference by the media. The Baltic states have seats in the Nordic Council as observer states and they also are members of the Nordic-Baltic Eight whereas Eastern European countries formed their own alliance called the Visegrád Group. Estonia Latvia Lithuania The Caucasus nations may be included in the definitions of Eastern Europe, the extent of their geographic or political affiliation with Europe varies by country and source. All three states are members of the European Unions Eastern Partnership program and the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, on 12 January 2002, the European Parliament noted that Armenia and Georgia may enter the EU in the future. Georgia — in modern geography, Georgia has been classified as part of Eastern Europe. Under the European Union’s geographic criteria, Georgia is viewed as part of Eastern Europe and is the only Caucasus country to be actively seeking EU membership and it is a member of Council of Europe and Eurocontrol

22.
Anglo-Frisian
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The Anglo-Frisian languages is the group of West Germanic languages that includes Anglic and Frisian. For additional detail, see Phonological history of Old English, ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that comprises Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon. It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison. High German languages Low Franconian languages Friedrich Maurer, Nordgermanen und Alemannen, Studien zur Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde,244 p. in German with English summary, Verlag Inspiration Un Ltd. Ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann, the Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, vol

23.
Old Saxony
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Adam of Bremen, writing in the 11th century, compared the shape of Old Saxony to a triangle, and estimated from angle to angle the distance was eight days journey. In area Old Saxony was the greatest of the German tribal duchies and it included the entire territory between the lower Elbe and Saale rivers almost to the Rhine. Between the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser it bordered the North Sea, the only parts of the territory which lay across the Elbe were the counties of Holstein and Ditmarsch. But not even with these four groups was the term of tribal division reached. For the Saxon “nation” was really a collection of clans of kindred stock. For example, the Nordalbingians alone were divided into groups, Holsteiners, Sturmarii, Bardi. Old Saxony is the place from which most of the raids, the region was called Old Saxony by the later descendants of Anglo-Saxon migrants to Britain, and their new colonies in Wessex and elsewhere were the New Saxony or Seaxna. Social differences were jealously guarded by social prescription, so tenaciously did the Saxons cling to their ancient customary law that clear traces of these social survivals persisted in Saxony down through the Middle Ages. Nor in one of these nations does aught remarkable occur, only that they join in the worship of Herthum, that is to say. —Tacitus, Germania,40, translated 1877 by Church and Brodribb, Tacitus believed that these tribal precursors of the Saxons were the original and ancient inhabitants of this land. Modern linguistic and archaeological evidence tends to support this, ptolemys Geographia, written in the 2nd century, is sometimes considered to contain the first mentioning of the Saxons. Some copies of this text mention a tribe called Saxones in the area to the north of the lower River Elbe, thought to derive from the word Sax or stone knife. However, other copies call the same tribe Axones, and it is considered likely that it is a misspelling of the tribe that Tacitus in his Germania called Aviones. These earliest known tribal Saxons inhabited Northern Albingia, a region bordering the northern bank of the mouth of River Elbe in what is now Western Holstein and this broader domain is called Old Saxony. The Chauci, according to Tacitus, also lived in the area later known as Old Saxony and were highly respected among Germanic tribes. He describes them as peaceful, calm, and levelheaded, at some point they may have merged with, or were perhaps synonymous to, the Saxons. The traditional date for this invasion is 449 and is known as the Adventus Saxonum, for the most part, the Saxon lands were a broad plain, save on the south, where they rose into hills and the low mountainous country of the Harz and Hesse. This low divide was all that separated the country of the Saxons from their ancient enemies and ultimate conquerors, the lack of clear physical definition along this border, from time immemorial, had been the cause of incessant tribal conflict between them

24.
Old Frisian
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Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Weser on the European North Sea coast. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland also spoke Old Frisian, the language of the earlier inhabitants of the region between the Zuiderzee and Ems River is attested in only a few personal names and place-names. Old Frisian evolved into Middle Frisian, spoken from the 16th to the 19th century, in the early Middle Ages, Frisia stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the Weser River in northern Germany. At the time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast and this region is referred to as Greater Frisia or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage. However, by 1300, their territory had been pushed back to the Zuiderzee, hence, a close relationship exists between Old Frisian and Old English. Generally, Old Frisian phonologically resembles Old English, in particular, it shares the palatalisation of velar consonants also found in Old English. For example, whereas the closely related Old Saxon and Old Dutch retain the velar in dag, Old Frisian has dei, when followed by front vowels the Germanic /k/ changed to a /tʃ/ sound. The Old Frisian for church was tzirke or tzerke, in Old English it was ċiriċe, while Old Saxon, another feature shared between the two is Anglo-Frisian brightening, which fronted a to e under some circumstances. In unstressed syllables, o merges into a, and i into e as in Old English, the old Germanic diphthongs *ai and *au become ē/ā and ā, respectively, in Old Frisian, as in ēn/ān from Proto-Germanic *ainaz, and brād from *braudą. In comparison, these diphthongs become ā and ēa in Old English, the diphthong *eu generally becomes ia, and Germanic *iu is retained. These diphthongs initially began with a i, but the stress later shifts to the second component, giving to iā. For example, thiād and liūde from Proto-Germanic *þeudō and *liudīz, between vowels, h generally disappears, as in Old English and Old Dutch. Word-initial h- on the hand is retained. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the 12th or 13th centuries, generally, all these texts are restricted to legal writings. These runic writings however usually consist of no more than inscriptions of a single or few words, amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins,2009. They show a degree of linguistic uniformity. Westeremden yew-stick Fon Alra Fresena Fridome Hunsigo MSS H1, H2, Ten Commandements,17 petitiones Londriucht Thet Freske Riim Skeltana Riucht law code

25.
Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law
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In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law is a description of a phonological development that occurred in the Ingvaeonic dialects of the West Germanic languages. This includes Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon, the sound change affected sequences of vowel + nasal consonant + fricative consonant. The sequences in question are -ns-, -mf-, and -nþ-, the nasal consonant disappeared, sometimes causing nasalization and compensatory lengthening of the vowel before it. The nasalization disappeared relatively soon after in many dialects along the coast, the resulting long nasalized vowel /ɑ̃ː/ was rounded to /oː/ in most languages under various circumstances. The Old Saxon words /ɣɑ̃ːs/ and /ũːs/ appear variably with and without a restored consonant, the sequence -nh- had already undergone a similar change in late Proto-Germanic several hundred years earlier, and affected all Germanic languages, not only the Ingvaeonic subgroup. The result of change was the same, a long nasal vowel. However, the nasalization in this case did not cause rounding of nasal /ɑ̃ː/ in Old Saxon. In Old English and Old Frisian, rounding occurred here as well, the /n/ has disappeared in English, Frisian, Low German, and dialectal Dutch with compensatory lengthening of the /u/. This phenomenon is observable throughout the Ingvaeonic languages. It does not affect High German, East Germanic or North Germanic, likewise, Germanic *tanþs > English tooth, North Frisian tôs, toss. Germanic *anþeraz > English other, Icelandic aðrir, West Frisian oar, West Flemish aajer, Germanic *gans > English goose, West Frisian goes, guos, Low German Goos, Faroese gás, Danish and Swedish gås. Germanic *fimf > English five, West Frisian fiif, East Frisian fieuw, Dutch vijf, Low German fiev, Germanic *samftō, -ijaz > English soft, West Frisian sêft, Low German sacht, Dutch zacht. English shows the results of the shift consistently throughout its repertoire of native lexemes, tenth - from Middle English tenthe. The original Germanic *tehundô, which was regularised to *tehunþô in early Ingvaeonic, was affected by the law, but the force of analogy with the cardinal number ten caused Middle English speakers to recreate the regular ordinal and re-insert the nasal consonant. Plinth - a loanword in Modern English from Greek, likewise, the rare occurrences of the combinations -nf-, -mf- and -ns- have similar explanations. Answer - originally had a dental, Old English andswaru. Unfair - the prefix un- is still productive, although Dutch is based mostly on the Hollandic dialects, which in turn were influenced by Frisian, it was also heavily influenced by the Brabantian dialect which tends not to show a shift. As a result, the shift is not applied but is still applied to some words

26.
Low Franconian languages
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The Frankish language, also Old Frankish, was the language of the Franks. It is a West Germanic language and was spoken in Merovingian times, the Franks first established themselves in the Netherlands and Flanders before they started to fight their way down south and east. The language had a significant impact on Old French and it evolved into Old Dutch in the north and it was replaced step by step by the langues doïl in the south. Old Frankish is not directly attested except in glosses and small phrases and it has been reconstructed using the comparative method from loanwords in Old French and from Old Dutch. One known phrase in Old Frankish is found in the Salic law of the sixth century. It was a language of the Old Frankish language. Old Low Franconian is sometimes divided in two groups, Old Dutch and Old East Low Franconian, Dutch, like other Germanic languages, is conventionally divided into three phases. During the 19th and 20th centuries these dialects have partly and gradually replaced by todays Standard German. Sometimes, Low Franconian is grouped together with Low German, the contemporary continental Low Franconian language area is decreasing in size. French Flanders has become more and more francophone during the last century, brussels Capital Region is officially bilingual, but largely francophone. In Germany, Low Franconian only exists as Meuse-Rhenish regiolects and dialects, at the Rhine near Duisburg, it adjoins a smaller strip of other Low Franconian varieties called Bergisch. Together these distinct varieties, now combined with the Kleve dialects as Meuse-Rhenish. Limburgish straddles the borderline between Low Franconian and Middle Franconian varieties and they are more-or-less mutually intelligible with the Ripuarian dialects, but show fewer High German shifts. Afrikaans originated from the Dutch language, the dialect became known as Cape Dutch. Later, Afrikaans was sometimes referred to as African Dutch or Kitchen Dutch. Dutch remained an official language until the new 1961 constitution finally stipulated the two languages in South Africa to be Afrikaans and English. It is the only Indo-European language of significance that underwent distinct development on the African continent, the South African Constitution of post 1994 considers Afrikaans as one of 11 official languages. The majority of Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are coloureds of mixed European/Black African/Khoisan/Indonesian descent, Afrikaans Dutch dialects Dutch language Franconian languages Istvaeones History of Dutch Low Dietsch Meuse-Rhenish Middle Dutch Euler, Wolfram

27.
Irminonic languages
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They are also spoken in diaspora in Romania, Russia, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Namibia. The High German languages are marked by the High German consonant shift, separating them from Low German and Low Franconian within the continental West Germanic dialect continuum. As a technical term, the high in High German is a reference to the group of dialects that forms High German, out of which developed Standard German. It refers to the Central Uplands and Alpine areas of central and southern Germany, it also includes Luxembourg, Austria, Liechtenstein and this is opposed to Low German, which is spoken in the lowlands and along the flat sea coasts of the North German Plain. High German in this sense can be subdivided into Upper German, Central German. High German is distinguished from other West Germanic varieties in that it took part in the High German consonant shift, to see this, compare English/Low German pan/Pann with Standard German Pfanne, English/Low German two/twee with Standard German zwei, English/Low German make/maken with Standard German machen. In the southernmost High Alemannic dialects, there is a further shift, the term High German as spoken in central and southern Germany and Austria was first documented in the 15th century. Divisions between subfamilies within Germanic are rarely defined, because most form continuous clines, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible. In particular, there has never been an original Proto-High German, for this and other reasons, the idea of representing the relationships between West Germanic language forms in a tree diagram at all is controversial among linguists. What follows should be used with care in the light of this caveat

28.
Dutch language
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It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after English and German. Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is said to be roughly in between them, Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the official name for Dutch is Nederlands, and its dialects have their own names, e. g. Hollands, West-Vlaams. The use of the word Vlaams to describe Standard Dutch for the variations prevalent in Flanders and used there, however, is common in the Netherlands, the Dutch language has been known under a variety of names. It derived from the Old Germanic word theudisk, one of the first names used for the non-Romance languages of Western Europe. It literarily means the language of the people, that is. The term was used as opposed to Latin, the language of writing. In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, later, theudisca appeared also in the Oaths of Strasbourg to refer to the Germanic portion of the oath. This led inevitably to confusion since similar terms referred to different languages, owing to Dutch commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries, the English term came to refer exclusively to the Dutch. A notable exception is Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a West Central German variety called Deitsch by its speakers, Jersey Dutch, on the other hand, as spoken until the 1950s in New Jersey, is a Dutch-based creole. In Dutch itself, Diets went out of common use - although Platdiets is still used for the transitional Limburgish-Ripuarian Low Dietsch dialects in northeast Belgium, Nederlands, the official Dutch word for Dutch, did not become firmly established until the 19th century. This designation had been in use as far back as the end of the 15th century, one of them was it reflected a distinction with Hoogduits, High Dutch, meaning the language spoken in Germany. The Hoog was later dropped, and thus, Duits narrowed down in meaning to refer to the German language. g, in English, too, Netherlandic is regarded as a more accurate term for the Dutch language, but is hardly ever used. Old Dutch branched off more or less around the same time Old English, Old High German, Old Frisian and Old Saxon did. During that period, it forced Old Frisian back from the western coast to the north of the Low Countries, on the other hand, Dutch has been replaced in adjacent lands in nowadays France and Germany. The division in Old, Middle and Modern Dutch is mostly conventional, one of the few moments linguists can detect somewhat of a revolution is when the Dutch standard language emerged and quickly established itself. This is assumed to have taken place in approximately the mid-first millennium BCE in the pre-Roman Northern European Iron Age, the Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups, East, West, and North Germanic. They remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, Dutch is part of the West Germanic group, which also includes English, Scots, Frisian, Low German and High German

29.
Luxembourgish
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Luxembourgish, Luxemburgish or Letzeburgesch is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. Worldwide, about 390,000 people speak Luxembourgish. To communicate, all luxembourgees have to learn 4 different languages in the school, Luxembourgish, german, french. Since the migration of 70% of the luxembourgees to the US, despite the lack of a sharp boundary between Luxembourgish and the neighboring German dialects, this has led several linguists to regard it as a separate, yet closely related language. Luxembourgish belongs to the West Central German group of High German languages and is the example of a Moselle Franconian language. Luxembourgish is the language of Luxembourg and one of three administrative languages, alongside French and German. Luxembourgish is also spoken in the Arelerland region of Belgium and in parts of Lorraine in France. In the German Eifel and Hunsrück regions, and in Lorraine, Moselle Franconian dialects outside the Luxembourg state border tend to have far fewer French loan words, and these mostly remain from the French Revolution. There are several distinct forms of Luxembourgish including Areler, Eechternoacher, Kliärrwer, Miseler, Stater, Veiner, Minetter and Weelzer. Further small vocabulary differences may be even between small villages. There is no distinct boundary between the use of Luxembourgish and the use of other closely related High German dialects, it instead forms a dialect continuum of gradual change. Spoken Luxembourgish is relatively hard to understand for speakers of German who are not familiar with Moselle Franconian dialects. However, they can read the language to some degree. For those Germans familiar with Moselle Franconian dialects, it is easy to understand. However, the number of French loanwords in Luxembourgish may hamper communication about certain topics. There is no intelligibility between Luxembourgish and French or any of the Romance dialects spoken in the adjacent parts of Belgium, erna Hennicot-Schoepges, President of the Christian Social Peoples Party of Luxembourg 1995–2003, was active in promoting the language beyond Luxembourgs borders. A number of proposals for standardising the orthography of Luxembourgish can be documented, there was no officially recognised system, however, until the adoption of the OLO on 5 June 1946. The rules explicitly rejected certain elements of German orthography, similarly, new principles were adopted for the spelling of French loanwords. A more successful standard eventually emerged from the work of the committee of specialists charged with the task of creating the Luxemburger Wörterbuch, published in 5 volumes between 1950 and 1977

30.
German language
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German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol, the German-speaking Community of Belgium and it is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg. Major languages which are most similar to German include other members of the West Germanic language branch, such as Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Luxembourgish and it is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English. One of the languages of the world, German is the first language of about 95 million people worldwide. The German speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of publication of new books. German derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, a portion of German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. With slightly different standardized variants, German is a pluricentric language, like English, German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and also other parts of the world. The history of the German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the migration period, when Martin Luther translated the Bible, he based his translation primarily on the standard bureaucratic language used in Saxony, also known as Meißner Deutsch. Copies of Luthers Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region that translated words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics initially rejected Luthers translation, and tried to create their own Catholic standard of the German language – the difference in relation to Protestant German was minimal. It was not until the middle of the 18th century that a widely accepted standard was created, until about 1800, standard German was mainly a written language, in urban northern Germany, the local Low German dialects were spoken. Standard German, which was different, was often learned as a foreign language with uncertain pronunciation. Northern German pronunciation was considered the standard in prescriptive pronunciation guides though, however, German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire and its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Some cities, such as Prague and Budapest, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain, others, such as Pozsony, were originally settled during the Habsburg period, and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest and Bratislava as well as cities like Zagreb, the most comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of the German language is found within the Deutsches Wörterbuch. This dictionary was created by the Brothers Grimm and is composed of 16 parts which were issued between 1852 and 1860, in 1872, grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook. In 1901, the 2nd Orthographical Conference ended with a standardization of the German language in its written form

31.
Inflection
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An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with a prefix, suffix or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change. For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning I will lead, includes the suffix -am, expressing person, number, the use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause I will lead, the lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense. The inflected form of a word contains both one or more free morphemes, and one or more bound morphemes. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars and its categories can be determined only from its context. Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement. For example, in the choir sings, choir is a singular noun, languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages. These can be inflected, or weakly inflected. Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a highly inflected word are called polysynthetic languages. Languages such as Mandarin Chinese that never use inflections are called analytic or isolating, in English most nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s, and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed. English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the person singular in the present tense. English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms, in addition, English also shows inflection by ablaut and umlaut, as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example, Write, wrote, written Sing, sang, sung Foot, feet Mouse, mice Child, children For details, see English plural, English verbs, and English irregular verbs. When a given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular, those that inflect differently are called irregular. For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs, in English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with the ending -d, thus verbs like play, arrive and enter are regular. However, there are a few hundred verbs which follow different patterns, such as sing–sang–sung and keep–kept–kept, irregular verbs often preserve patterns which were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous. Example, Latin dīcō, dīcere, dīxī, dictum > Spanish digo, decir, dije, strong vs. weak inflection—Sometimes two inflection systems exist, conventionally classified as strong and weak. Ancient Greek verbs are likewise said to have had a first aorist, suppletion—The irregular form was originally derived from a different root

32.
Grammatical case
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Case is a special grammatical category whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle or numeral in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners, participles, prepositions, numerals, articles and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in. Distinctions can be seen with the pronouns, forms such as I, he and we are used in the role of subject, whereas forms such as me, him. A language may have a number of different cases, commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition, as a language evolves, cases can merge, a phenomenon formally called syncretism. More formally, case has been defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads, cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient. They are often related, and in languages such as Latin several thematic roles have an associated case. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, because thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence. The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, the Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. falling, fall. The sense is that all cases are considered to have fallen away from the nominative. This picture is reflected in the word declension, from Latin declinere, to lean. The equivalent to case in several other European languages also derives from casus, including cas in French, caso in Spanish, the Finnish equivalent is sija, which can also mean position or support. Although not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages, with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German and Modern Greek, in German, cases are mostly marked on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the role in the sentence. This is not how English works, where word order and prepositions are used to achieve this, Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class, for other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the genitive clitic -s. The oblique case, used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, the genitive case, used for a grammatical possessor

33.
Nominative
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Generally, the noun that is doing something is in the nominative, and the nominative is often the form listed in dictionaries. Dionysius Thrax in his Art of Grammar refers to it as orthḗ or eutheîa straight, thus the reference or least marked form of an adjective might be the nominative masculine singular. The parts of speech which are often declined and therefore may have a case are nouns, adjectives, pronouns and less frequently numerals. The nominative case often indicates the subject of a verb but sometimes does not indicate any relationship with other parts of a sentence. In some languages the nominative case is unmarked, it may be said to be marked by a zero morpheme. Moreover, in most languages with a case, the nominative form is the lemma. English still retains some nominative pronouns, which are contrasted with the accusative, I, we, he, she, they, a usage that is archaic in most, but not all, current English dialects is the singular second-person pronoun thou. A special case is the word you, Originally, ye was its form and you the accusative. The term nominative case is most properly used in the discussion of languages, such as Latin, Greek. The term objective case is used for the oblique case, which covers the roles of accusative, dative. The genitive case is usually called the possessive form, rather than a noun case per se. In this system, English is said to have two cases, the subjective and the objective, the nominative case marks the subject of a verb. When the verb is active, the nominative is the person or thing doing the action, when the verb is passive, the nominative can also change adjectives into nouns Socrates was a wise man. German nominative case A lesson covering the case in the German language The Nominative Case - Russian Grammar A lesson covering the nominative case in the Russian language

34.
Masculinity
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Masculinity is a set of attributes, behaviors and roles generally associated with boys and men. Masculinity is made up of both socially-defined and biologically-created factors, distinct from the definition of the biological sex. Both males and females can exhibit masculine traits and behavior and those exhibiting both masculine and feminine characteristics are considered androgynous, and feminist philosophers have argued that gender ambiguity may blur gender classification. Masculine traits include courage, independence and assertiveness and these traits vary by location and context, and are influenced by social and cultural factors. An overemphasis on masculinity and power, often associated with a disregard for consequences, masculine qualities, characteristics or roles are considered typical of, or appropriate for, a boy or man. They have degrees of comparison, more masculine and most masculine, the concept of masculinity varies historically and culturally, although the dandy was seen as a 19th-century ideal of masculinity, he is considered effeminate by modern standards. Masculine norms, as described in Ronald F and these norms reinforce gender roles by associating attributes and characteristics with one gender. The academic study of masculinity received increased attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s and this has sparked investigation of the intersection of masculinity with other axes of social discrimination and concepts from other fields, such as the social construction of gender difference. In many cultures, displaying characteristics not typical of ones gender may be a social problem, in sociology, this labeling is known as gender assumptions and is part of socialization to meet the mores of a society. Non-standard behavior may be considered indicative of homosexuality, despite the fact that expression, gender identity. When sexuality is defined in terms of choice, male homosexuality is interpreted as effeminacy. Social disapproval of excessive masculinity may be expressed as machismo or by such as testosterone poisoning. The relative importance of socialization and genetics in the development of masculinity is debated, the historical development of gender roles is addressed by behavioural genetics, evolutionary psychology, human ecology, anthropology and sociology. All human cultures seem to encourage gender roles in literature, costume and song, examples may include the epics of Homer, the Hengist and Horsa tales, more specialized treatments of masculinity may be found in the Bhagavad Gita and the bushidō of Hagakure. The extent to which masculinity is inborn or conditioned is debated, genome research has yielded information about the development of masculine characteristics and the process of sexual differentiation specific to the human reproductive system. The testis determining factor on the Y chromosome, critical for male sexual development, the activation of SRY halts the process of creating a female, beginning a chain of events leading to testicle formation, androgen production and a number of pre- and post-natal hormonal effects. How a child develops gender identity is also debated, some believe that masculinity is linked to the male body, in this view, masculinity is associated with male genitalia. Others have suggested that although masculinity may be influenced by biology, proponents of this view argue that women can become men hormonally and physically, and many aspects of masculinity assumed to be natural are linguistically and culturally driven

35.
Femininity
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Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Femininity is socially constructed, but made up of both socially-defined and biologically-created factors and this makes it distinct from the definition of the biological female sex, as both males and females can exhibit feminine traits. People who exhibit a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics are considered androgynous, and feminist philosophers have argued that gender ambiguity may blur gender classification. In some non-English speaking cultures, certain concepts or inanimate objects are considered feminine or masculine, tara Williams has suggested that modern notions of femininity in English speaking society began during the English medieval period at the time of the bubonic plague in the 1300s. Women in the Early Middle Ages were referred to simply within their traditional roles of maiden, wife, after the Black Death in England wiped out approximately half the population, traditional gender roles of wife and mother changed, and opportunities opened up for women in society. Prudence Allen has traced how the concept of woman changed during this period, the words femininity and womanhood are first recorded in Chaucer around 1380. Girls, second-wave feminists said, were then socialized with toys, games, television and school into conforming to feminine values, femininity is sometimes linked with sexual objectification and sexual appeal. Sexual passiveness, or sexual receptivity, is considered feminine while sexual assertiveness. Some queer theorists and other postmodernists, however, have rejected the sex /gender dichotomy as a dangerous simplification, an ongoing debate with regards to sex and psychology concerns the extent to which gender identity and gender-specific behavior is due to socialization versus inborn factors. According to Diane F. Halpern, both play a role, but the relative importance of each must still be investigated. The nature versus nurture question, for example, is debated and is continually revitalized by new research findings. Some hold that feminine identity is partly a given and partly a goal to be sought, in 1959, researchers such as John Money and Anke Erhardt proposed the prenatal hormone theory. This theory, however, has been criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds, Money also argued that gender identity is formed during a childs first three years. In Carl Jungs school of psychology, the anima and animus are the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The anima and animus are described by Jung as elements of his theory of the collective unconscious, a domain of the unconscious that transcends the personal psyche. In the unconscious of the male, it finds expression as a feminine inner personality, anima, equivalently, in the unconscious of the female, it is expressed as a masculine inner personality, animus. In Western cultures, the ideal of feminine appearance has traditionally included long, flowing hair, clear skin, a narrow waist, in other cultures, however, expectations are different. For example, in parts of the world, underarm hair is not considered unfeminine

36.
Old Dutch
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In linguistics, Old Dutch or Old Low Franconian is the set of Franconian dialects spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 5th to the 12th century. Old Dutch is mostly recorded on fragmentary relics, and words have been reconstructed from Middle Dutch and it evolved into Middle Dutch around the 12th century. Before the advent of Old Dutch or any of the Germanic languages, the North Sea Germanic dialects were spoken in the whole of the coastal parts of the Netherlands and Belgium. It was largely replaced by Weser-Rhine Germanic dialects, spoken by the Salian Franks and it spread from northern Belgium and the southern Netherlands to the coast and evolved into Old Low Franconian or Old Dutch. It has, however, a North sea Germanic substrate, which is why some philologists put the language in that branch, linguists typically date this transition to around the 5th century. Old Dutch is divided in Old West Low Franconian and Old East Low Franconian, however, the divergence being that the latter shares more traits with neighboring historical forms of Central Franconian dialects such as Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian. Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old Dutch share the subsumption of the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, much of the grammatical variation between Old Dutch and Old Saxon is similar to that between Old Dutch and Old High German. Old Dutch naturally evolved into Middle Dutch with some distinctions that approximate those found in most medieval West Germanic languages. The year 1150 CE is often cited as the time of the discontinuity, the most notable difference between Old and Middle Dutch is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction. Round vowels in word-final syllables are rather frequent in Old Dutch, in Modern Dutch, recasting is necessary to form a coherent sentence. Old Dutch texts are rare and much more limited when compared to related languages like Old English. Most of the earliest texts written in the Netherlands were written in Latin rather than Old Dutch, some of these Latin texts, however, contained Old Dutch words interspersed with the Latin text. Also, it is hard to determine whether a text actually was written in Old Dutch, wad Several words that are known to have developed in the Netherlands before Old Dutch was spoken have been found, and are sometimes called Oudnederlands in a geographic sense. The oldest known example, wad, was mentioned in 108 AD by Tacitus. The word exclusively referred to the region and ground type that is now known as the Wadden Sea, however, since this word existed long before Old Dutch did, it cannot be considered part of its vocabulary, but rather of Proto-Germanic. Haþuþuwas ann kusjam loguns This sentence has been interpreted as of Haþuþewaz, I bestow upon the choosers of the swords. It was discovered on a sword sheath, excavated in 1996 in the Dutch village of Bergakker and is better described as Frankish than Old Dutch. The text however, does show the beginning of Old Dutch morphology, the word ann, found in the partially translated inscription is coined as the oldest Dutch by linguists Nicoline van der Sijs and Tanneke Schoonheim from Genootschap Onze Taal

37.
Dialect continuum
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That happens, for example, across large parts of India or the Maghreb. Historically, it happened in various parts of Europe such as between Portugal, southern Belgium and southern Italy, and between Flanders and Austria. Leonard Bloomfield used the dialect area. It is analogous to a species in evolutionary biology. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves, in this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical. Instead, dialectologists map variation of language features across a dialect continuum. The influential Atlas linguistique de la France pioneered the use of a trained fieldworker and these atlases typically consist of display maps, each showing local forms of a particular item at the survey locations. Secondary studies may include maps, showing the areal distribution of various variants. A common tool in these maps is an isogloss, a line separating areas where different variants of a particular feature predominate, in a dialect continuum, isoglosses for different features are typically spread out, reflecting the gradual transition between varieties. A bundle of coinciding isoglosses indicate a stronger dialect boundary, as might occur at geographical obstacles or long-standing political boundaries, in other cases, intersecting isoglosses and more complex patterns are found. Standard varieties may be developed and codified from one or more locations in a continuum, in such cases the local variety is said to be dependent on, or heteronomous with respect to, the standard variety. The Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are cited as examples. Conversely, a defined in this way may include local varieties that are mutually unintelligible. The choice of standard is determined by a political boundary. As a results, speakers on either side of the boundary may use almost identical varieties, but treat them as dependent on different standards, the choice may be a matter of national, regional or religious identity, and may be controversial. In the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, a standard was developed from local varieties within a continuum with Serbia to the north, the standard was deliberately based on varieties from the west of the republic that were most different from standard Bulgarian. Now known as Macedonian, it is the standard of the independent Republic of Macedonia. Europe provides several examples of dialect continua, the largest of which involve the Germanic, Romance and Slavic branches of the Indo-European language family

Old English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest historical form of the English language, …

A detail of the first page of the Beowulf manuscript, showing the words "ofer hron rade", translated as "over the whale's road (sea)". It is an example of an Old English stylistic device, the kenning.

Alfred the Great statue in Winchester, Hampshire. The 9th-century English King proposed that primary education be taught in English, with those wishing to advance to holy orders to continue their studies in Latin.

Europe in the late 5th century. Most names shown are the Latin names of 5th century peoples, with the exceptions of Syagrius (king of a Gallo-Roman rump state), Odoacer (Germanic king of Italy), and (Julius) Nepos (nominally the last Western Roman emperor, de facto ruler of Dalmatia).

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin …

Image: Cardinal vowels Jones x ray

The authors of textbooks or similar publications often create revised versions of the IPA chart to express their own preferences or needs. The image displays one such version. Only the black symbols are part of the IPA; common additional symbols are in grey.

Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. It has …

Nikolai Trubetzkoy, 1920s

The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonemic point of view. Note the intersection of the two circles—the distinction between short a, i and u is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel length.

The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic point of view. Note that the two circles are totally separate—none of the vowel-sounds made by speakers of one language is made by speakers of the other.

Case is a special grammatical category of a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle or numeral whose value reflects the …

Number of grammatical cases currently in use in European languages. Light grey areas are for languages which don't use grammatical cases.

On this sign in Russian memorializing an anniversary of the city of Balakhna, the word Balakhna on the right is in the nominative case, whereas the word Balakhne is in the dative case in Balakhne 500 Let ('Balakhna is 500 years old') on the front of the sign. Furthermore, let is in the genitive (plural) case.

In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological …

High German subdivides into Upper German (green) and Central German (blue), and is distinguished from Low German (yellow) and Dutch. The main isoglosses – the Benrath and Speyer lines – are marked in black. NB: This map shows the modern boundaries of the languages.

Latin or Roman script is a set of graphic signs (script) based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, which is …

The distribution of the Latin script. The dark green areas show the countries where the Latin script is the sole main script. Light green shows countries where Latin co-exists with other scripts. Latin-script alphabets are sometimes extensively used in areas coloured grey due to the use of unofficial second languages, such as French in Algeria and English in Egypt, and to Latin transliteration of the official script, such as pinyin in China.